Tough Armors and Weak Bodies

As always I was late. I boarded the company bus at the last minute. All seats were already occupied. I was relieved to see that I wasn’t the only one who will make the half an hour journey standing in the bus. I saw a girl standing near the door talking to another female sitting on the first row of seats. “Some how these girls always stick together” I mused (Fellowships).

I looked around. There were several guys sitting in the bus. I wondered what would I have done had I been sitting—guess I would have offered her my seat. I took a quick glance at her whole body—she was about 5’4”, slim built, somewhat beautiful, surely desirable, but most certainly very capable of enduring half an hour of standing.

A guy sat by the window next to the female our desirable girl was talking to. He was looking outside the window. Now I knew if I were him I would have offered the girl my seat. But somehow this guy was untouched by such chauvinistic spikes I always failed to resist. Did he feel any guilt? Did he feel ashamed of not doing what people expect him to?

I took a closer look at him. He didn’t look serious; he didn’t look lost in his thoughts. I am hell sure he wasn’t really looking outside either. His eyes had a look of a stoic. They looked hard, almost as if they had frozen solid. His lips firmly closed, he never looked inside the bus (not once even at our desirable girl!!!). His legs moved once in a while but his eyes were fixed outside. He had the look of an impeccable patriarch, of Al Pacino in Scarface. Experience can only teach you the kind of insecurities that are usually hidden behind those stony faces and confident looks.

Despite his apparently I-don’t-care look, I could see that he just has had an internal debate whether or not to give the girl his seat. Between the two debating parties, let’s say, the social-guy and the girls-are-equal-guy; obviously the latter won. But the former refused to leave the stage completely, and this tussle brought in the open a third guy—I-don’t-care-guy.

Only one question remained—who was he fooling?